‘Missing’ pre-Civil War deed book returns to Surry County following restoration
Published 5:05 pm Friday, June 27, 2025
HF Group Director of Conservation Matt Johnson and Surry County Clerk of Circuit Court Thomas L.S. Mayes place the replica Deed Book No. 10 on a shelf between books No. 9 and No. 11 in the courthouse records room. (Photos by Stephen Faleski | The Smithfield Times)
The replica Deed Book No. 10 sits next to the original.
The original handwritten records from 1834 through 1839 are now preserved in a binder of polyester sleeves.
A dedication inside the replica deed book credits the Jamestowne Society, the Virginia Daughters of the American Revolution, William & Carol Lowell of Isle of Wight County, Surry Clerk of Court Thomas L.S. Mayes and the Surry Circuit Court SRA funds with paying for the restoration of Deed Book No. 10.
From left are Greg Brooks of the C.W. Warthen Co., which served as an intermediary between Surry County’s court system and HF Group; HF Group Director of Conservation Matt Johnson; Jamestowne Society Executive Director Bonnie Hofmeyer; registrar and genealogist Lyndon Hart and Surry County Clerk of Circuit Court Thomas L.S. Mayes holding the replica of Surry’s “missing” Deed Book No. 10.
After a painstaking restoration process, a pre-Civil War book of Surry County’s land ownership records has returned home.
Sandwiched between two thick tomes in the Circuit Court records room – one labeled Deed Book No. 9 containing records from 1830-34, the other labeled Deed Book No. 11 containing records from 1839-43 – is a non-matching volume labeled “Missing Deed Book No. 10.”
Though it contains land transfer records from 1834 to 1839, the book itself has only been on the shelf since June 25. It’s a replica that HF Group, a Greensboro, North Carolina contractor the Library of Virginia uses to preserve its rarest documents, created from scans after Circuit Court Clerk Thomas L.S. Mayes found the original last year.
The original has been lost for most of its existence, hence the title of the facsimile.
In 1839, someone broke into the clerk’s’ office and removed it. No one knows to this day who took it. An 1839 court order states only that “the clerk’s office of this court was forcibly entered” the night of April 8 of that year “by some person or persons as yet unknown, and the book in which deeds have been recorded from November 1834 to the 25th of March 1839 stolen therefrom.”
According to Mayes, the book had been returned by 1869 when it turned up in inventory during an audit, only to disappear again, this time for over a century.
The next person to lay eyes on the missing deed book was Ransom B. True, a doctoral student at the College of William and Mary who by 1983 had earned his degree and cited pages 195 through 197 of the book in an academic paper on Surry’s 17th century Smith’s Fort Plantation.
True wrote that the missing deed book had “rested hidden in the depression at the very top of the cabinets in the clerk’s office until it was found within the past year.” By the time he saw it, the book was “very much mutilated and defaced apparently from exposure to weather, so that the breaker portion of it is illegible” and had “suffered from heat and may once have been through a fire.”
The book disappeared for a third time shortly after True’s encounter and remained missing for another 41 years.
Mayes, the 11th great-grandson of Francis Clements, who was clerk of court in Surry from 1697 to 1708, followed in his ancestor’s footsteps in 2023 when he stood for election and won a four-way race to become clerk of the Circuit Court. Several months after taking office, he found Deed Book No. 10 decaying inside a taped cardboard beverage box in a sealed file cabinet alongside its companion court order book from the 1830s.
Mayes has long been fascinated by history and in 2006, based on his lineage, joined the Jamestowne Society, an organization of descendants of Jamestown’s pre-1700 settlers. The Jamestown Society funded $24,000, or just over half of the nearly $46,000 cost Mayes was quoted by HF Group for the restoration. Another $10,000 came from the Virginia Daughters of the American Revolution. Mayes said the remaining $13,000 was covered by a combination of Surry’s Secure Remote Access, or SRA, court funds and Mayes’ own $593 donation.
The HF Group proposal states the original suffered extensive damage, including heavy staining and some areas of scorching. The contracted work included cleaning and placing each page into a solution to deacidify the ink used in early books, which could sometimes burn through both sides of the paper, and then scanning each page.
“It was about a three-month process,” said HF Group Director of Conservation Matt Johnson.
HF Group returned two books to Surry County, the original, whose pages are now protected in polyester sleeves, and the facsimile.
The return completes Surry’s collection of land ownership records dating back to the county’s 1652 founding. Mayes said he plans to move the oldest deed books, including the original Deed Book No. 10, from the records room to a vault original to the 1923 courthouse.
“I remain excited about the restoration of our original old vault, now underway, that will allow all of our earliest records to continue to be housed in a fireproof environment,” Mayes said.
